My weekend movie: The Mortal Storm (1940)

In the service of that Country there were no human relationships…

January 30, 1933 – In a small University Town in Germany, not far from the Austrian border, the “non-Arian” Professor Victor Roth, who lives in comfort and honour loved by his students and family – his wife, Arian stepsons Otto and Erich, his daughter Freya and the younger son Rudi – celebrates his 60th anniversary. After a moving ceremony at the Medicine faculty where he works, the Professor finally enjoys an evening with his family and friends, the right occasion to announce Freya’s engagement with Fritz. But suddenly the maid arrives all excited whit a news just heard at the radio: Adolf Hitler is the new German Chancellor…

The Mortal Storm (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

This way begins The Mortal Storm, the 1940 drama directed by Frank Borzage and starring Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Robert Young and Frank Morgan and guess what? From that point on everything goes wrong. It came out that Fritz (Robert Young) is nothing but a Nazi party enthusiast member, just like Otto (Robert Stack) and Erich. Freya (Margaret Sullavan) understands she has made a mistake preferring him to Martin (James Stewart), the loyal non-Nazi friend, and Professor Roth (Frank Morgan) foresees future troubles that soon arrive. Martin defends a “non-Arian” teacher hit by Nazis, helps him to leave Germany and has to flee the Country himself and go to Austria. Freya resolves to leave Fritz and the “non-Arian” Professor Roth is accused to sabotage the new Nazi Germany teaching a scientific fact: there’s no difference between Arian and “non-Arian” blood. At first he’s sacked, then he’s imprisoned in a concentration camp where he soon dies. Trying to move to Austria whit her mother and young Rudi, Freya is caught by border officers with the draft of her father’s last book in her suitcase. She can do nothing but go back home where she unexpectedly finds Martin who, at the risk of his life, came back only to save hers. They confess each other their mutual love and after a touching informal wedding ceremony celebrated by Martin’s mother (Maria Ouspenskaya), they try to escape through a mountain pass and to cross the border skying. But at the Nazi’s headquarter everybody knows what is going to happen and Fritz is chosen to catch them….

I spare you the very ending, anyway after such an exhaustive synopsis you’ve surely understood that this is an anti-Nazi propaganda film, but why should you watch it today apart from its A-list cast?

Margaret Sullavan(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Mortal Storm, released on June 14 1940 exactly 9 months and a half after the Nazi invasion of Poland, was judged relevant but a bit dated by some film critic and yet this film, based on the 1938 novel with the same title written by the British writer Phyllis Bottome, explicitly citing Hitler’s name, Nazi Germany, beatings-up, intimidation, discrimination and even concentration camps (though depicted in a far too optimistic way despite Professor Roth’s death), but forgetting to cite explicitly Jews and calling them instead “non-Arian”,was one of the few anti-Nazi movies produced and released before the American entry in WWII in 1941. Is it possible that studio moguls didn’t find swastikas, brown shirts, Roman salutes and Nazis atrocities photogenic enough to grab the American audience’s attention? There are different theories and an ongoing debate between historian on this subject. Surely in early 1930’s, when lots of people still preferred to believe that Nazism once reached the power would have been able to renounce to his more ferocious side, nobody was ready to risk to be cut out of the German market. Money does not stink, business is business, not Hitler (apparently a voracious cinéphile) nor the powerful Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (a great admirer of the American film industry) wanted to deprive German people of Hollywood films, so why do something that could annoy them? Recently someone talked about a shocking “collaboration” between Hollywood and the Nazi regime with scripts passed to the German Consul based in Los Angeles to be “adjusted”. Others, saying that the films were censored in fact in Germany where, obviously, the presence of unwelcome themes or even actors could lead to a ban on single titles, admit that Studios often tried to prevent this self-censoring their movies.

Hitler Youth members performing the Nazi salute at a rally at the Lustgarten in Berlin, 1933 (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

To be true after 1936 only MGM (the Studio that later will produce The Mortal Storm), Paramount and 20th Century Fox still distribute their films in Germany (Warner Brothers, for instance, had left the German market in 1934 after its representative, an English Jew, had been hit by Nazis, an event leading to his death a few months later). This is the reason why someone else affirms that the shortage of explicit anti-Nazi films produced before 1940 is in fact another mere consequence of the strict application of the infamous Motion Picture Production Code (the so called Hays Code) stating among other things “The history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.”, which means the Ultra-Nazi Germany and Hitler were included. And the silence about the discrimination and violence on Jews where, according to this theory, a consequence of the anti-Semitism affecting not only Europe but also the American society.

Obviously the invasion of Poland and the subsequent outburst of WWII changed everything and in 1940 The Mortal Storm lead to the ban of all MGM films from Germany, a measure probably welcomed at that point.

We now know how the History ended and that makes quite difficult not to consider The Mortal Storm a film a bit naïve: real Nazis were worst than those depicted there. Anyway this movie shows quite effectively how Nazism could literally consumed human relationships, expelling from the German society those considered dissidents or “impure” and calling to a blind obedience with no possible dispensation all Nazi party members (“in the service of your Country there are no human relationships…” said the Nazi official to Fritz when he tries not to lead the mission to catch Freya and Martin ), and this is a reason sufficient to watch this film again today.

A few related movies you could also like (click on the title to watch a clip or the trailer):